Given patternQuiz kicked off in the weeks before [insert appropriate festive season here], (smart move John) and just after it was announced typepad had their major outage (you can imagine the panic), pulling the Quiz for a couple of days, and then I moved it to its new home webpatterns.org, I was really pleased with how well the first installment went. After asking the first question, I realized it was a big expectation to have you submit a fully thought out pattern description for whole sites, yet quite a few people did it anyway. Before we continue with navigation patterns, which was my next planned patternQuiz, I thought I’d make it a bit easier, by asking: “what types of web site are there?” No need for a detailed description if you don’t like. So far, we have detailed descriptions for
blog
wiki
academic sites
online store
web application
forum/message board
gallery
“brochureware”
conference site
What others can you think of – and what aliases do they go under?
Next up, we’ll look at navigation patterns, and take the wraps off the wiki.
John
{ 7 } Comments
I don’t know how specific you intend this initial list to be, but you could break, “academic sites” down into:
– academic institutional sites (registrar, bursar, other official sites) – academic extracurricular sites (groups, clubs, sports, etc.) – academic departmental sites (each department site usually includes info on: majors, courses, faculty, facilities, etc.)
Also, other general categories:
– personal sites (not necessarily blogs) – intranets – extranets – administrative sides to websites
- directory – show (podcast) – project – workflow – workspace (content editor) – document (ODF representation) – map (neighborhood, building, etc.) – newspaper
- government agency
– local government
– central government
– NGO
Is it possible that a band site could be its own category? It could fit under various other sites like blog, personal site, web store, but if shows gets a category, this one will be my contribution.
Justin,
I just added the following comment to patternQuiz I.
https://webpatterns.org/wordpress/?p=4#comment-33
I think the question you raise is an interesting one – are patterns content derived or not? I suggest that it’s not the content itself, or the organisation which “owns” the site which constitues the pattern, rather, it is the structure of the site as a whole. For example, a band site will often be a blog. But it might also be a wiki, or brochureware, or some other pattern we’ve not named yet.
John, I’m coming into the discussion a little late in the game, but I’ve been doing more and more thinking about this recently. In reading through and considering some of these examples, I’m starting to think about webpatterns at many different levels. Certainly some sites are more singularly focused, and thus, can more easily be identified as pattern X or pattern Y.
What’s really starting to interest me are the more bottom-up patterns at the page-level and/or section-level of a site, rather than a site as a whole pattern. A page or section of a site might essentially be composed of specific combinations of microformats and other “stuff” that has the potential of being defined as a future microformat.
So we have a blog page, which might be composed of posts/entries, archive listings, links of interest, categories, blogrolls, teasers to photos or photo collections, current music of interest, etc…
Then we have a contact info page, which could consist of a contact form, address/phone information, maps, people and titles or departments to contact, and more…
Trying to classify something like a band site as a single pattern could be very difficult, because band sites can vary so dramatically, based on what the band wants to—and has the ability to—comminicate about themselves. But I can immediately start to envision that many band sites could make use of one or more subpatterns, if you will. Upcoming shows, discography and/or song lists, description pages, news or blog entries, reviews, photos… and the list of subpatterns goes on.
Then, by extension, one could obviously zoom out and start to identify more complex, compound webpatterns. What gets really interesting to me is when you start to identify the overlapping subpatterns in one type of site to the next. So a band site may consist of some of the same subpatterns as a fine artist site, but may also share subpatterns with the site for a politician who makes lots of public appearances. The politician site shares patterns with non-profit orgs, and non-profits share patterns with heavy commercially-driven sites, etc.
Ok, I’ll stop there. But plenty more for us to talk about.
Doug,
I think you have outlined a clear and important distinction – the content of a page or site, from the type of page or site it is – a band site could be “brochureware” or a blog or indeed any of a number of other site patterns.
The bottom up approach to building a pattern language I think has a lot of merit – not least of which is that the product of the eforts are more immediately usable. There is also the benefit that the patterns are more straightforward, and hopefully less open to debate.
I look forward to continuing this discussion we started in the Southern Alps of New Zealand back in 2004
j
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